I agree we are trillions of dollars in debt. Obviously. However I don’t think that defense spending is the reason. It is entitlements spending. Entitlements to people and to favored businesses. Both parties are guilty. Ethanol and crop subsidies weren’t strictly, or even mostly, democrat party ideas.
Entitlements spending has been growing on a linear scale for decades, which is troubling enough. However, under Dear Reader, it has gone on afterburners. We are past the tipping point where half the population doesn’t pay income taxes. We are fast approaching, and with another term for Dear Reader we will reach, the point where the majority of Americans don’t even work.
THAT will be death of us.
That is precisely correct. Around this point in the 20th century, Federal expenditures were 6% of GDP, including 1% for defense. We are now spending 36% of GDP at the Federal level (including about 5% for defense). In other words, Federal non-defense expenditures have gone up from 5% to 31% in the past century.
If we zeroed out the defense budget, we'd still have a $700b a year budget deficit. The reason it's so huge is because Obama carried over what Bush expected to be one-time expenditures in 2008 in a vain attempt to boost GDP. In essence our budget deficit is caused by the moral equivalent of having people dig holes and fill them up again - paying unemployment benefits to people for years and expanding eligibility for welfare benefits.